Explore insights on leadership capacity and sustainable performance.

A good CEO doesn’t ignore struggling divisions and hope the strong ones compensate forever. They invest in the whole portfolio. Because there will always be ebb and flow from season to season. Now consider the six domains of your Internal Ecology™ system, because the same logic applies directly to your leadership capacity right now.

What words drive you a little bonkers when it comes to leadership? “Try” is one of mine. It’s like a permission slip for partial commitment. I cringe inside every time I hear it. (Even when I use it, and sometimes I do, I stop in my tracks, consider what I really mean, and rephrase it.) “I’ll try.” “We’ll try.” “Let’s try to make it happen.” What does 'try' really say to someone? 🤷‍♀️ Maybe I will. 🤷‍♀️ Maybe I won’t. 🤷‍♂️ I’ll see what happens. 🤷‍♂️ It’s not important en

...I’ve watched this pattern play out across my decades in the corporate world. High performers who gave everything to their careers and arrived at a health crisis that no one, including them, saw coming. And the signals were there. They were always there. But nobody stopped long enough to really listen to them. Or they heard them and overrode them anyway, because the push was louder.

...The brain operates in two primary modes. The first is a focused, task-oriented mode, active when you’re in a meeting, solving a problem, writing, deciding, producing. This is the mode most high performers live in almost exclusively. After all, those are the visible outputs that get measured as leaders. The second is what neuroscientists call the default mode network, a brain state that activates during rest, open attention, and unstructured time...

And to myself, I wondered: was the stress of not knowing holding something in my body that movement alone couldn’t release?

And still, for years, and albeit contraindicative to what I had learned, if it wasn’t high intensity, it wasn’t good enough. It didn't count. That was the rule, mostly unspoken but completely ingrained. Push harder. Go longer. Every day or not good enough. That culture starts young in gyms and in life these days, and I absorbed it completely. What I didn’t fully understand, despite everything I knew, was that I was breaking down more than I was building. It wasn’t because I l

It started at twelve...here’s what I want you to take from this, more than anything else: none of this means my capacity is at its peak every day of my life. It isn’t. Some days still ask more of me than I have. What’s different now is that I’ve built a noticing muscle, one I didn’t have at twelve, or even in my thirties or most of my forties. I notice sooner. And because I notice, I have access to the choice, the shift, the higher-capacity option, whenever I need it to thriv

What people see in you is the application layer: your clarity of thought, your decisions under pressure, your presence in the room, the performance that sustains over time, the innovation that produces new ideas when the old ones stop working. That's what gets noticed. That's what gets evaluated. Underneath it, mostly invisible, is the infrastructure layer. Internal Ecology™, the six domains that form a system...

...you've been living in PUSH for a long time. But turning to the 'push' approach doesn't create a paradigm shift. It just cobbles more onto your to-do list. In this article, learn what it takes and doesn't take to strengthen your Internal Ecology for sustainable leadership.

Standing on that hillside, every single domain was alive. I was physically moving and challenged. I was fueled - by real food, real air, real color. I was sleeping deeply. I was regulated, calm in a way I have to work harder to access at home. I was connected to people I enjoy. And I was growing, the way I always do when I'm somewhere that asks something different of me.